After experiencing a two-month outbreak of COVID-19 which triggered a nation-wide level 3 alert from mid-May to mid-July (the alert level had been reduced to level 2 on July 23th), based on the bilingual platform Nusantara Archive that was expanded this July (originally the online No Man’s Land journal), the “Nusantara Archive” A-I-R program which has gathered artists from Taiwan and the Malay Archipelago is finally ready to be relaunched. This project is an extension of the NML Residency & Nusantara Archive Project that utilizes nusantara as both its communication framework and research category. The following are the four groups of artists in residency online this year: Li Kuei-pi, lololol (Xia Lin and Sheryl Cheung), Phuan Thai-meng (Malaysia), Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina (Indonesia). For the very year, Nusantara Archive features the “Twinning Archipelago” as its theme, inviting four groups of artists to submit their A-I-R proposals.

Apart from the writing proposal in the Nusantara Archive bilingual brochures, this year’s residency project will integrate several tangible interfaces on our new platform, such as Podcast and VR Navigator map (or the project based on Google Earth app), as the artist’s option for diversity proposal. We hope to present the dialectical process of dispersion, congregation, and articulation among multiple concepts of “islands島” (such as Austronesia南島, Taiwan and its offshore islands離島, Malay/ Indonesian Archipelago馬來/ 印尼群島). This A-I-R program not only continues to cooperate with several artists from the 2020 workshop “Nusantara in Future Tense” including Sheryl Cheung (member of lololol) and Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, but no doubt newly involved artists such as Xia Lin (member of lololol), Li Kuei-pi, and Phuan Thai-meng will also enrich the program with more media implementations featuring localized style, explore and develop the diverse paths of the “Twinning Archipelago” based on the artists’ practices, and continue to construct a future nusantara network that surpasses national boundaries towards the oceanic civilization.

Advisor: Ministry of Culture (Taiwan)
Producer: The Cultural Taiwan Foundation
Co-Producer: SEA plateaus
Organizer: Nusantara Archive / Digital Art Foundation
Project Director: Rikey Tenn Bun-ki
Project Co-Host: Esther Lin Yi-chun
Technical Support: Et@t – Chan Yuan-an
Designer: Zoe Chen
Translator: Chung Yi-ting